Well, the holidays are here, so you know what that means … Jingle the Reindeer is nearly here!

[Image credit: animalcrossing.neoseeker.com]

Seeing Jingle and getting some awesome new sectional couches from him is the perfect way to culminate an entire semester spent studying Animal Crossing: New Leaf. I’ve sure learned a lot about the game and its players, and I couldn’t have done it without the affordances of the various pieces of hardware and software available to me. Here’s a picture of my textual ecology:

Other than looking like an onion, another vital feature of my textaul ecology trail is the means of filtration it offered. Feedly served as a hub for all my means of information acquisition, synched with diigo, Pocket and Zotero. In combination with my Tags 5.0 archive, everything I needed for my Pecha Kucha lived in just two places, simplifying my organization.

First, I needed to become familiar with the game, so I continued to play throughout the semester on my Nintendo 3DS, which has wifi connectivity and Twitter integration. I uploaded some pictures of my own play time (just like many of the tweeters in my archive), and I can attest to the ease of sharing pictures on the device. I created a Google Alert for “Animal Crossing: New Leaf,” which sent me many fan blogs and journals and news updates, and entering “Animal Crossing: New Leaf” into a search engine yielded results for tons of videos on Youtube, fan sites and tumblr pages, dedicated to the sharing aspects of the game (QR codes, town tune designs and such).

Animal Crossing is a game I play in my personal life (outside of work), and I’d be willing to bet that if I bumped into an old acquaintance, I probably wouldn’t feel comfortable telling them I spend 45 minutes every other day talking to my secretary dog about how to improve my fake town. But, as Clay Shirky notes in “It’s Not Information Overload, It’s Filter Failure,” I’ve identified Animal Crossing as a personal technology rather than a facet of my personal life. Turns out, for me, and for many of the online fan communities surrounding Animal Crossing, these mediators — Twitter, tumblr, Youtube — have all become extensions of our relationship with the game, and I extended that mediation even further by examining what mediates the mediators.